This Boy's Life Review

Robert De Niro plays Dwight Hansen as a small man with a loud mouth, a gas station mechanic who marries into a family so that he can finally outrank somebody, and the performance frightens precisely because it never reaches for grandeur. Michael Caton-Jones shoots Concrete, Washington as a wet grey trap of mill smoke and pine, and the 1950s dressing resists nostalgia in a way most period coming of age pictures cannot manage.

DiCaprio, sixteen when it was shot, does something harder than suffering well. He makes Toby manipulative, a liar and a forger who fights back using the same dishonesty his stepfather uses on him. The mustard scene and the later business with the Scout knife work because the camera stays on the boy's calculation rather than his fear.

Ellen Barkin has the thinnest part, and that is the real problem here. Caroline's decision to stay is the engine of the story and the script never gets inside it, so she drifts through scenes as an occasion for other people's behaviour. The last movement is brisk in a way the preceding two hours have not earned, resolving by departure what the film spent its length insisting could not be escaped.